Norton Zinder, 1928-2012

Norton Zinder made two important discoveries in the field of virology. While a Ph.D. student with Joshua Lederberg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison he found that viruses of bacteria (bacteriophages) could move genes from one host to another, a process called transduction. Later in his own laboratory at The Rockefeller University he isolated the first bacteriophages that contain RNA as genetic material. These were seminal findings in the growing field of molecular biology.